Chaucer’s Fabliaux as Analogues by Erik Hertog

Abstract

REVIEWS the way, wonderful insights about Chaucerian characters and passages of brilliance. In accord with what seems to have become a trend, there is an index but no bibliography; notes are fashionably skimpy and basically post-1980s. JANE CHANCE Rice University ERIK HERTOG. Chaucer's Fabliauxas Analogues. Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, 1stser.,vol. 19.Leuven [Belgium]: Leuven University Press, 1991. Pp. viii, 290. Bel Francs 1490. Hertog's monograph is an innovative study of the traditions in which Chaucer worked. He focuses on the tales of the Summoner, the Reeve, the Miller, the Merchant,and, to alesserextent,the Shipman.Theargumentis that an acquaintance with the analogues heightens our response to Chau­ cer's complex variations. It is like stag-party jokes: if you know the tradition, you will understand the clever variations. If the jokester opens with "Hey, waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?" or "This guy comes into this bar, see, with this parrot (or this mouse and this tiny piano)," you are prepared for variations on familiar themes, characters, and situations. A gifted storyteller can startle and amuse. If these jokes had been part of Chaucer's (and his audience's) repertoire, he would have made such trifles into supremely successful anecdotes. Hertog maintains that one can better appreciate the poet's sophisticated complexities (in The Merchant's Tale especially) if one knows the analogue tradition. There is a problem: as we all know, before Chaucer there were no fabliaux in English, as Hertog admits several times. There was Dame Sirith, of course, but it is a feeble "piece of entertainment" (p. 4) that does not really qualify as a fabliau. Hertog wisely resists the temptation to reconstruct hypothetical Middle English fabliaux. Instead, he focuses on extant Continental versions that Chaucer probably knew. He does not fall into the Ur-Hamlettrap, familiar to Shakespeare scholars (some of whom have acceded to the temptation of guessing what the nonexistent play was like). 219 SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Hertog establishes, in minute detail, the nature of the fabliaux that Chaucer and his listeners and readers probably knew. It is a laborious process that calls upon many of the fashionable modern and postmodern techniques, including those of Barthes, Greimas, and Eco. To demonstrate his points (not pointes, as the publisher misprints it several times), Hertog uses some two dozen charts, with arrows and other, more arcane, symbols.He is careful to distinguish his methodology from old-fashioned source study, but he is a little embarrassed by his own ponderous reconstruction: "The following enumerative survey describing these analogous semantic fields...is inevitably a bit dry, but I hope it has its moments" (p. 158); "To bring this conclusion-and study-to an end long overdue, a few final thoughts on Analogy" (p.246); "We began this study with a rather elephantine definition of the fabliau.I am afraid we shall have to conclude it in a similar fashion in an attempt to define the second term ofour title, viz.the phenomenon ofthose very similar stories, called 'analogues' " (p.251). Hippopotoman though his study may sometimes be, Hertog succeeds in persuading us that Chaucer wasfamiliar with the Continentaltradition.He does not concede that the poet used some lost version (in English or whatever) that included all, or most, of the modifications that have de­ lighted readers for 600 years.No, the artistry is Chaucer's own. The study includes chapters on plot, character, thematics, and genre, all persuasively argued.Hertogdoes not treat style, which many readers would call the glory of the fabliaux included in The Canterbury Tales, but imaginative reconstruction can do only so much.At its best the analysis is a genial and enthusiastic (and refreshingly old-fashioned) close reading of Chaucer's clever retellings. The poet's great achievement is obvious, and Hertog does not neglect it: all the tales in the collection, and perhaps especially the fabliaux, are enriched by the intertextuality created by their inclusion in the framework narrative, with its devilishly cunning links of tale to tale, tale to narrator, and tale to General Prologue portraits.Hertog also includesa briefappreciationofThe Canterbury Talesascompared with Chaucer's earlier works. There are two valuable byproducts: first, a...